Brian McLaren reflects on how contemplation and community enable him to live according to the values of the kingdom of God:
During my years as a news junkie, I found myself getting a strange high from the latest ugliness report. Each time I indulged, I fanned the flames of something unhealthy … my moral superiority, or resentment, or fear, or despair, or desolation, or us-versus-them hostilities….
The internal realities we construct in our minds actually exist in our minds, ugly or beautiful, false or true. They shape our internal values which influence our external behavior. We tend to make the world around us resemble the world within us. Based on our focus, ugliness is everywhere or beauty abounds.
Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal writer from Australia. As an indigenous person, she understands that the end of the world has been happening for centuries for indigenous people. She understands that both colonizers and colonized need to be liberated from the mindset of colonization. The first step toward freedom, she says, is to decolonize or de-capitalize the mind, so you can “develop strengths that will not be defined by how others believe you should think.” She calls this liberation “sovereignty of mind” [1] ….
The journey to sovereignty of mind requires an inward migration, where we in a sense become refugees from our external nation, culture, economy, and civilization, even though we still live within its borders. We withdraw inwardly….
When I heard Alexis Wright speak of this inward migration, I felt I gained a new insight into Jesus and his oft-quoted but rarely understood term “kingdom of God.” “The kingdom of God is within you,” he said (Luke 17:21). He described the innermost room of your consciousness (Matthew 6:6), where you go to think differently, to sort out your desires and hopes authentically. When you learn how to do that inward migration, that spiritual migration, you find yourself looking for others who have also gone there, who have discovered a freedom and sovereignty of mind….
[Jesus said,] “Wherever two or three of you gather in my name, there I am,” and [we] might understand him to say, “Listen, I understand that you are outnumbered. I understand that so many people around you have been sucked into the story of ugliness. I understand that you are learning to live by a different story where beauty abounds. You don’t need me physically present to tell the beautiful story. You can tell it yourselves. Even just two or three of you can gather together, embodying my way of being in the world. You can be cells of resistance, outposts of transformation, seedbeds of beauty.”
That is the best future I can imagine for organized religion in these dangerous times. Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on this inward migration toward sovereignty of mind, where in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty… seeing it, creating it, savoring it. Savoring beauty within will lead to beautiful outward action.
References:
[1] Alexis Wright, from “The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times,” Emergence Magazine (October 26, 2022).
Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), 214, 215, 216–217.
Image credit and inspiration: Annie Quick, untitled (detail), 2025, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Bare feet resting on the earth signifies a quiet monastic gesture. Reactivity loosens its grip and a contemplative response can arise.
Story from Our Community:
The meditation by Greg Boyle so touched me, especially this: “The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest … and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy.” Defiant joy! What a wonderful phrase! In spite of everything, seek defiant joy. I’m focused on walking to and from the cancer center for my appointments, walking to the hospital on the day of my surgery, walking, not being wheeled, into surgery. I describe this as “defiant health.” I look forward to seeking defiant joy!
—Lea M.
